For all it’s quotability (more on that in a minute) and fun, inventive, occasionally disturbing displays of violence (more on that, too), last night’s episode of Justified was mostly devoted to shuffling the pieces around the board a little bit. That’s not a bad thing by any means, especially on a show that opened up four big plotlines — Raylan going all Blank Check in a criminal’s mansion, Boyd and Wynn going 0-for-the-season on drug deals, Boyd and Mysterious Latvian Lady circling each other like snakes (who may or may not want to have steamy snake sex right there in the bar), and The Ballad of Dewey Crowe, Whorehouse Proprietor — in the first two episodes. That’s a lot of stuff that’s gonna need paying off, probably in a way that ties most or all of it together, so, yeah, shuffle away.

Since there’s not much by way of a unifying theme to discuss, I’d instead like to take the rest of this pre-bullet-point intro to point something out that you’re all probably aware of, but needs saying anyway: Through three episodes, save a shovel-whacking here and a bat-clobbering there, Raylan has spent most of his time drinking free top-shelf liquor, bowling, and playing kissyface with an attractive weed-smoking social worker in a gold-filled mansion he confiscated from the Detroit mob’s money launderer. Raylan Givens lives a charmed life.

And now, the highlights:

Lot going on with Boyd. Let’s try to run it all down fairly quickly: He’s a drug dealer who is out of drugs and money; his beloved fiancee is in jail facing a murder charge; he’s got one man who can help him with her case and that person just woke up from a coma and proceeded to order the town’s corrupt sheriff to exact revenge on Boyd for putting him in it; he’s got said man’s shady and mysterious mail order Eastern European wife trying to extort and/or seduce him; and now Dewey Crowe is showing up at his door demanding $100,000 because some dude from Florida popped up out of nowhere and started flipping through the classifieds. My man needs a weekend in Cabo or something.

One other Boyd note: I had mostly forgotten about his giant swastika tattoo until last night. Both the show and his character have come a long way since season one.

I don’t condone torture as a means of interrogation, and there’s plenty of research to show that it’s not even all that effective, but if you really, really insist on using it, you could do a lot worse than handing Wynn Duffy a BB gun and letting him run free for a couple minutes. (“Ear.”)

Here’s something special: Michael Rapaport, a man from New York, playing Daryl Crowe, Jr., a Redneck crime boss from Florida with a thick Southern accent, trying to pronounce “cafe con leche,” a Spanish term that refers to a delicious coffee concoction. We are truly blessed.

And speaking of the Crowe family, it dawned on me last night that Boyd’s big “PUT YO’ FOOT DOWN, DEWEY CROWE” speech was basically just the criminal, Kentucky version of the “I SEE PRIDE. I SEE POW-AH” speech from Cool Runnings. I don’t really have a point here. Maybe that Boyd and Dewey should try bobsledding.

But really, what good is a whorehouse if it doesn’t have curb appeal, you know?

If I thought I could have gotten away with using it without running afoul of our fine sponsors (and, please, feel free to click on any of the links you see on the screen for quality products and services), this is the quote I would have used in the headline:

For those of you tracking last night’s Failed Gold Heist Caper: Raylan thought the guy with the bat was sent by Monroe to intimidate him, Monroe thought the guy was working with either his not-maid or Wynn Duffy, Rachel thought the guy might be in cahoots with Allison, Allison said the guy was there to intimidate her, the guy said he was only there because Allison planted drugs on him to take his son into protective services, Monroe sent in his not-maid to try to steal it for him in the least thought-out heist in history, and after she got caught she helped Raylan set him up and the whole thing resulted in Wynn Duffy’s goon shooting him before Rachel could draw to arrest him. Everyone on this show is terrible at their jobs. I hope they never change.

That thing with Monroe and his not-maid… ho-lee hell. That was… disturbing. Give me a hooker with a heart of gold shooting a high-ranking county official who surprised her by coming out of the bathroom dressed as a bear over hyper-violent racially-charged breath play every day of the week. That was a strange sentence to type.

“You gotta spend less time screwing up other people’s lives and more time fixing your own.” – Raylan Givens, life coach.

No joke: Every time Raylan boards the Wynnebago my heart skips two or three beats. (“So, you’re protecting me from a situation you created?” “I could see how you could see it that way, if you wanna focus on the negative.”)

The thing where Rachel moved into the house as Raylan’s backup/chaperone and spent the whole episode busting his balls raised an important point: We’ve all discussed Team Winona vs. Team Ava vs. Team Bartender vs. Team Allison the Social Worker, but the truth is that the entire argument is moot. Raylan and Rachel need to quit screwing around and get married.

According to the previews, next week’s episode features both Tim AND a Raylan/Boyd scene. YESSSSSSSSSS.

Oh, and there’s this, which is made 1000000000x better by the fact that the brief, menacing conversation took place on a bedazzled pink flip phone:

That about sums it up. Feel free to chime in with your thoughts below. Please do not repeatedly shoot me in the face with a BB gun.

‘Justified’ Recap: ‘Put Your Foot Down, Dewey Crowe!’

My take on Gloria, the “not maid” is that she was not a stupid criminal at all. She wanted to get caught deliberately. There’s no way she was going back to Monroe after nearly being suffocated. My understanding of that scene is that he fully intended to kill her and thought that he had. He only slapped her face to make sure she was dead and seemed surprised that she came to, gasping and coughing. Maybe VJ can shed some light on this?

Also, I love it that Rachel is getting all up in Raylon’s grill. Maybe she is the one that will whip him into shape- make him shoot straight again ( sorry, bad analogy )

If the mysterious Latvian lady and Boyd ever do get down to knocking boots, you just know that she is gonna be on top riding Crowder….pussy can be a powerful thing- even more so if it’s strange pussy !

I can’t feel sorry for Ava. Boyd did have a point in that she was the one who killed Delroy and she was the one who let the only witness to the murder testify to the police. Show the man some gratitude for trying as hard as he is.

I can’t help but think Ava’s lawyer, while jamming out to Bachageddon, has a hidden microphone in his walkman recording all of Boyd and Ava’s conversations for the gripping tell-all novel he’s writing. Well, that’s what I’d do anyway.

Okie. Something is bothering Me. Mara said to Boyd could you get a body. Could you get two bodies. This is in reference to getting a body and putting Boyd’s tattoo on said body so that he can be proved dead. Why two bodies?

Any and all actual police work Raylan has done so far (dealing with the two guys trying to kill the kid, dealing with the baseball bat guy, dealing with the gold/safe situation) has only been done to further his quest to get into blonde social workers pants.

Dewey’s “the curb is peelin'” line just killed me. On a separate note: what exactly are Boyd and Mara plotting with dead bodies and tattoos? They’re trying to convince Paxton that Boyd is dead, so they’re going to use one of the bodies in his morgue and decorate it with some of Boyd’s tattoos? What’s their end-game?

I think she’s only “bad” in the same way that Raylan is “bad”. It’s the whole means to an end moral ambiguity thing in how you do your job. At some point it’s going to bite one or both of them in the ass.

“Raylan thought the guy with the bat was sent by Monroe to intimidate him, Monroe thought the guy was working with either his not-maid or Wynn Duffy, Rachel thought the guy might be in cahoots with Allison, Allison said the guy was there to intimidate her, the guy said he was only there because Allison planted drugs on him to take his son into protective services, Monroe sent in his not-maid to try to steal it for him in the least thought-out heist in history, and after she got caught she helped Raylan set him up and the whole thing resulted in Wynn Duffy’s goon shooting him before Rachel could draw to arrest him. Everyone on this show is terrible at their jobs. I hope they never change.”

Except for Duffy’s goon right? I mean that guy pretty much did exactly what he is paid to do.

At this point, Raylan is basically a humorous version of Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” character. He just walks around smoothly beating the crap out of people and makin’ with the ladies. Also, I know it’s been said already but the BB gun scene was awesome. What a great method of interrogation, “bad cop/BB gun cop”.

Question for the gif makers: Any way we can get a gif of Raylan’s face after Rachel tells him to call if he’s going to be late for dinner? Nobody does sardonic, I can’t believe this crap quite like Timothy Olyphant.

Question for VJ: I asked this too late last week, as was out of the office and away from my computer, but did y’all deliberately pick Mara for the Eastern European woman’s name as a call-back to The Shield and Vindrell’s Mara?

Side note, I love her, but will be sad if her and Boyd start a thing, because of Ava. Great job showing what its like in prison for Ava without actually showing her much.

Boyd’s hair was relatively tame in this episode. Does it seem when he’s more contemplative his hair has some restraint, but when he’s action oriented his hair goes crazy. Is Boyd’s hair a groundhog like indicator of coming events? This is the most thought I’ve ever put into hair.

Man, I loved Wynn in this episode. The BB gun escapades, the call back to season 1 and his first appearance with the safe installation, wynn-e-bago conversations, mike is actually a badass, etc.

Not to mention how Ava’s lawyer is hilarious…he almost got to be relevant. I love that he blasts classical music.

And when this show ends next year, just create a spin-off where raylan and rachel get married and live in that house: tim is the sassy butler, art is the wacky uncle, boyd is the crazy cousin, and wynn is raylan’s business partner. please.

Im from NC, and my accent sounds like a Matlock villain. Floridians dont even really sound southern since there are so many that are basically transplants. I guess its like going to Manhattan and finding someone with a real NY accent.

I have been all over the south. You can tell the difference in accents from nearly every state. Hell, it some states the accent breaks down into different regions of the state. Rappaports accent is a black comedian attempting a redneck accent for the first time accent.

Probably because the mistakes on this show are consistent with the development of the characters, whereas True Blood just changes characters motivations and personalities when it feels like it for the sake of the plot. So writing basically

How is there not a gif of Amy Smart smacking her ass as she’s going up the stairs?

Great episode. The whole business with the baseball bat thug and the gold in the house was really confusing though, as is often the case with this show. That’s not really a bad thing, but sometimes I can’t figure out until the end of an episode or even a season if all the characters are supposed to be this stupid or if the plotting is just shoddy. It always ends up on the right side of that line, thankfully.

I agree on Rapaport, when he’s on the screen interacting with characters I always feel as though we’re one second away from something violent happening, despite the fact that he hasn’t thrown so much as a punch thus far. He’s menacing in the same way Quarles was (IMO)

My favorite line last night was when Dewey went to confront Boyd about the whorehouse price, and he mangled Daryl’s line about the restaurant’s “curb appeal” to say it was a good price, “even if the curb is peelin’.”

Dewey is the gift that keeps on giving. For me, he was at his best when he thought he had four kidneys, and kept taking the lords name in vein even when warned not to by a god-fearing Quik-Shop owner from Harlan County.

Great episode. My feelings on Daryl are complicated. I am on board with Rapaport as the character and his accent, I like his character and how he manipulates to get what he wants while making it seem he is not in charge of the situation, but he just hasn’t made a big impact yet. Time will tell. He just doesn’t seem to be a menacing type of Villain as in previous years. And, from preview of upcoming episodes, it almost sounds like the Crowes and Boyd will team up at some point.
–[www.thefutoncritic.com]

I’m curious whether Wade actually was skimming from Dewey’s profits to give to Boyd, or if Daryl, the other cousin and that creepy Haitian dude just beat the crap out of Wade until he said he would tell Dewey that. Skimming like that doesn’t seem like something Boyd would be involved in, and I think Daryl got just enough information from Dewey about who sold him the whorehouse during that classifieds conversation to put together that story so that he could create leverage that would keep Dewey from kicking him out and/or not paying him off.

In conclusion, I just hope we see lots more of Wendy Crowe this season. She was slamming.

Lobster Mobster: you’re right, that totally slipped my mind. It was the same guy that went to pick up Johnny’s girl last night. I was too caught up in thoughts of hooker threesomes to properly remember.